Hockey Dreams

by David Adams Richards

  I told him that I thought sometimes we were pathological delusionists. That our entire country was filled with pathological delusionists. Talk about being boring or stuffy or uninteresting. We were the bravest and craziest, the most interesting country in the world. Each one of us was worth fifteen Laplanders.

  We get out on a baseball mound in April, and play golf in the snow. Even my father was a pathological delusionist. He owned a drive-in theatre.

  I shouldn’t say “even” my father because he was the case supreme. Sometimes in late October, at the little drive-in in Bushville he’d be playing Beach Blanket Bingo and giving away free hot chocolate with an order of fish and chips. It was as if the poor bugger was going to make his fortune doing this.

  Snow would be dawdling down, all the underpaid staff in long underwear, the projectionist in hat and gloves. Ginette, who worked for us faithfully, there making fish and chip boxes, and thawing out wieners.

  But the worst of this is — cars actually start arriving.

  Neddy Brown and his family, the grandpa as drunk as a snake, and Neddy wearing sunglasses in a cheap Elvis imitation jacket: “How ya doin — how ya doing tonight — are ya lonesome — lonesome tonight?”

  This is true, I don’t lie about things (or at least I don’t like to get caught lying about things).

  Paul said he knew it was all true and he believed me. “It was just like poor Stafford and his rubber snake,” he said. “He kept trying to convince his brothers and sisters that it was real — tried to feed it mice — just like he tried to convince us that Gordie Howe phoned him up.”

  “Pathological delusionists,” I said, a little sheepishly, because one day Gordie Howe actually did phone me up.

  SIX

  IT WAS, THAT DAY IN 1989, when I went back to visit the town and met Paul, as if we were finally beginning to recognize what and who we were. It was deep winter — one of those winter days when you either go to work or start to drink wine at seven in the morning. We were walking along the highway on our way to visit Stafford Foley.

  I could see how Stafford, back in 1961, would think his snake was real. He would think it was real because he wanted it to be real. He didn’t want to sleepwalk — walking down the street in his slippers. He didn’t want to have insulin attacks, where he would become as strong as the Amazing Hulk, and five or six of us would have to hold him down and feed him a sugar cube. He didn’t want to be tiny and blind. He wanted to have his own snake. He wanted to play hockey.

  And if it wasn’t going to happen he would become a pathological delusionist. He would tell people Gordie Howe phoned him or he was over talking to the coach — who wanted him to become a scout for the team. Stafford had all kinds of plans such as this, back in 1961, and he was no more deluded than most of us.

  Not only did my father play Beach Blanket Bingo in October, where we would stand about in earmuffs watching our breath — and of course Annette — but, when I was not much older than this, we would have beach parties in January after a hockey game.

  Yes we were all essentially madly self-deluded.

  “But that is the fabric of our entire lives,” Paul said. “Self-delusions, overcome by self-mockery.”

  “And others’ mockery of us overcome by self-delusion.”

  Like Stafford and Michael. Like Phillip Luff’s father who wanted Phillip so badly to become a great hockey player that even when Phillip was in his 30s he couldn’t put away his skates. Even though his body was broken up and hurt, tormented by injury, he did not, for his father’s sake give up the fantastic dream. Even though his father by then wanted him to, Phillip could not.

  “Still delusion or no, there will always be great moments,” Paul said, “great moments for us in hockey.”

  Hockey and other things as well. Mr. Foley played hockey in Europe on the army team from the North Shore. They played exhibition games in Scotland and England.

  He was a great winger. Yet the greatest moment of Mr. Foley’s life came on D-Day.

  On D-Day Mr. Foley was doing the one thing that he didn’t quite expect to be doing. When the North Shore Regiment reached the wall, and skirted the first town, Mr. Foley had the opportunity to help deliver a baby girl, wrap it in swaddling clothes and keep on fighting.

  Paul and Stafford knew this. And Mr. and Mrs. Foley could never ever turn anyone away from their door. Any child, any orphan was theirs. So, for that hockey year of 1961, was little Tobias.

  I was once reprimanded by one of our new generation for thinking too much of children as orphans, or underprivileged little humans. Still and all, I knew my share of them. And I suppose as Mr. Foley thought, if you know one, you know them all. That is, orphans are like murderers. Once you know one, you can clue in to certain aspects of all of the others.

  Murderers almost always smile as if you’re the one they wouldn’t kill, and orphans almost always smile as if you’re the one they belong to. Both of them, like Canadians, can be self-deluded about their essential makeup.

  Tobias used to attend all the birthday parties at the Foleys’ and leave certain articles of clothing there, so he could come back at a later date to retrieve them. But at other birthday parties he was left out. Shamefully I don’t remember him being invited to mine.

  I remember a richer kid — one of the Griffin kids, showing Tobias and Michael his new goalie pads and skates and saying with smug certainty (as if he was repeating what his father had told him), “Kids like that always like to be shown what they are missing.”

  Tobias did like to see what other children had. And Stafford on more than one occasion complained to us that Tobias was in his bed upstairs sleeping. The first time I heard him complain I was at the door to get a glass of water after a game of road hockey.

  “How can I work — how can I concentrate, how can I feed my snake — how can I make out my coach’s report, how can I write in my hockey journal — if Tobias’s sleeping up there?”

  “Let him sleep,” Mrs. Foley said. “I’ll wake him up later.”

  “I wouldn’t sleepwalk down to his house,” Stafford would say. “I have a twin brother — who gets all the credit and is on the All-Star team, and now I have a person sleeping in my bed. It’s as if — as if I don’t exist — as if I’m — im-material.”

  I drank my water and listened to him.

  He walked about the kitchen, with one strand of hair sticking up, and his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

  The sad thing was Michael overheard this as well.

  Stafford did have a point. His brothers went out to play on the All-Star team — Darren was so good he had been elevated to the Bantam As, and Stafford would sit in the stands with his sisters cheering and holding his handkerchief in his hand.

  “Skate — skate,” he would yell, or “Hit him — hit him — move, move.”

  But at times Stafford became very smug with me. I had to pretend a lot. Stafford would talk to the coach, drive back and forth with his father and players to the big game, sit in the dressing room, look over somebody else’s equipment. He became an essential part of the team without having much to do with it. To him I was just any other fan.

  “They think he’s me,” his brother would complain to his mother. “He’s going around taking credit for all my work.”

  “And who takes credit for all of my work,” Stafford shot back, “I’m a scout for the team — I have responsibilities. I know every player on every team in the North Shore — and I have someone who has taken over my life, sleeps in my bed, borrows my puck, pats my mouse, borrows my stick, comes in for breakfast and sits at my place waiting for toast. I’m disappearing — slowly but surely, and I refuse to let that happen.”

  Stafford was essentially saying that Tobias was like Bette Davis’s understudy in that movie and he was determined to fight back before the understudy got the leading role. Or like that girl in the story of the three bears.

  On the other hand his twin brother, Darren, thought Stafford was the understudy trying to take
over.

  Mr. Foley drove them back and forth to the games, his face flushed from a drink or two of wine. Almost always he had a bottle or two of wine rolling about under the seat of the car.

  On Sunday they would be at church, Tobias with them wandering behind them about three feet. They would receive communion, mumble their prayers, all go back to the same pew, all look saintly.

  Then Stafford would go home, up to his room where he would go over the rosters of the other teams in the All-Star league; who was scoring, who was dangerous — in his notebooks the best players had an X beside them in red. This was in 1961, and at least four of these players either had tryouts with the NHL or made it into semi-pro by 1970. A few more could have made it, if the bottle didn’t get to them.

  Stafford knew the game of hockey. But like some he had a quirky knowledge. Like many Canadians it was out of his heart and soul instead of his mind. But still at the age of eleven, like thousands of other Canadians, he probably knew the game as well as Mr. Norris.

  But it was a delusion on his part to think he was making the slightest difference in keeping a record for the Bantam As. In the North Shore Bantam As there were three teams we could beat, and two teams we couldn’t. No amount of roster checking would improve this.

  He would sit at his desk, his rubber snake in a cardboard box beside him, with its tin of water, his magnifying glass nearby.

  Outside, one of those snowstorms that always came in our youth and stayed for months, fell. His house was one of those hard brick, two-storey ones with cement steps, in the middle of our neighbourhood. The halls were blank and wide and white. The windows rattled. One room was hot, the rest were cold. There were almost no books. Palm leaves from the last Palm Sunday still stuck into a picture of the Pope, and the kitchen was filled with coats and hats and boots and cookies with a bite or two taken out of them. In the cracked basement were eleven or twelve mismatched pairs of skates, hockey pads, goalie gloves, mitts, pucks covered in oil. This was where Michael’s pair of skates had come from. Size seven on his right foot, size nine on his left.

  It was a house, then, like a hundred others in our town. From the window across the hall you could see the sweep of the snow-packed Miramichi. Far away in Bushville, you could spy the dots of children on a rink — but this was not Michael’s rink.

  And in Stafford’s room, which he shared with Paul and his twin, and lately Tobias, he sat at one of those small all-conforming, wooden desks and made out his report to the coach.

  By the time he finished, Tobias would be asleep on his bed.

  Tobias called sleeping in Stafford’s bed, playing with Stafford. Stafford would walk about the room on his tiptoes so as not to wake him, as those dreary monotonous Sunday afternoons passed.

  Only Michael became furious with Tobias over this. At times Michael’s fury could reach out and try to crush his brother — half-brother really — blaming him for everything that went wrong. He hated Tobias at times, hated him with all the misery in his heart, hated him for following him to games, for having to share his sticks. Hated him for going to the Foleys’. But it was at the Foleys’ where Tobias could sleep.

  At four in the afternoon Stafford would wake him.

  “Oh,” Tobias would say, “I fell asleep.”

  Tobias got scared one afternoon when he woke and saw Stafford with a needle in his arm. “Don’t worry,” Stafford whispered, “I do this every day.”

  Tobias thought Stafford’s house was the greatest house in the world, and Stafford the greatest person he had had the opportunity to meet. He couldn’t believe anyone could be lucky enough to live there.

  After dark, the snow still falling, over all the eastern world from the Gaspé to the Miramichi, covering the thousands of square miles, the small valleys and dark lonely bridges — after dark and after he had eaten his supper, Tobias left the Foley house and walked down to where the streetlights ended.

  “I for one am not sorry to see him go — I have things to do — we’re going to start a broomball league tonight at cubs —” And sniffing in unfelt derision, baseball cards in his pocket, with the players names scratched out and names like Delveccio written over them, Stafford would finally, pepper shaker in hand, sit down to his stew.

  Tobias’ grandmother, who was called his mother, was named Bert. She was a tough leather-necked, half-mad, old lady. No one knew where their fathers were or where their mother had gone. Bert’s last name, like Tobias’ was Kennedy, although Michael’s name was LaGrim.

  Bert would hobble about on her two canes from window to snowy window, place to place, watching for people to come up the ice-slicked path. The windows were covered in plastic to keep out the elements.

  During Christmas she would wait for the turkey to arrive from the priest house, or wait for some minister from a strange, obscure church to come and talk, about Tobias.

  Bert talked out of the side of her mouth, puffing a hand-rolled cigarette, and drinking homemade wine. I would come down some days to sit and wait for Michael.

  Bert said there would be no man on the moon in her life time. “Crows will be flying arse-first across the Miramichi before they put a man on the moon,” she told us one snowy afternoon in January, and then coughed up phlegm, until her face turned beet red, laughing, and hauling on her cigerette. She had the habit of chewing the loose tobacco with her teeth, and a tiny shred of white paper was always stuck to her lips.

  I told my uncle about what she had said about the moon landing.

  “Who told you?” he said.

  “Old Mrs. Kennedy said it.”

  When Bert spoke Michael would sit in the corner, his eyes fixed on the old stove that heated most of the house, unflinching. He never disagreed with her.

  Stafford and I were helping Michael make his nets. He was no carpenter, and he was worried about losing his whole plan of having a rink, and his own team, if he couldn’t have the nets. He needed fish net, but the only one he had was one that an uncle of his had used to poach with. It was a four-inch gill, twisted and ripped. His uncle had drowned in it.

  There were other things about Michael that winter. He was talked to by people we didn’t know who sometimes came up that grey ice-slicked path those dark afternoons. The police had also questioned him about a break-in at the creamery.

  He wanted to have nets like they had at the rink, but four-inch mesh was too large. You could put a puck right through it. Which Stafford and I immediately recognized as probably our only chance to score a goal.

  Michael needed to be as delusional as Stafford and I, as Paul Foley, years later, said we all were.

  “You were all delusional to think that hockey would behave well no matter how it was treated,” Paul said. “Can the will ever be there to get back to the way it was? — only if it doesn’t matter to others. Others have found a way to redefine it. And no-one can or should ever blame the players. They have to go to make a living.

  “Where would you rather play — in Skunk Ridge like Phillip Luff or Chicago like Denis Savard? But still the players always know there are tradeoffs.

  “But you see what has been done lately — and our media plays at least its part — during the amateur draft is to create a great dazzling world of the auction block. The principle idea invested in is this: that we as Proud Canadians are overwhelmed that a certain boy from Brandon or Sault Ste. Marie, is picked over someone from Sweden to go to Los Angeles. No longer do we even have a pretence of claiming it as ours. Nor should we. That is the shame of it.”

  He continued, “I will tell you how an uncle died, and you might relate it to Canadian hockey. He went into the hospital, and the doctors and nurses joked with him and told him that he was doing fine. He believed the doctors. So he did not worry, until the pain got too severe.

  “He went back to the hospital. The doctors re-evaluated and found that they had made a mistake with the first diagnosis. In a strange way this was blamed on him. Hadn’t he known the pain was severe?

  “They told him tha
t if he followed the proper precautions he would get better. So he entered the second stage of his illness. But things had advanced by neglect, so that no matter what precautions he deteriorated and the illness advanced to the third stage. And it was in this third stage where his relatives, as the audience, began to see that no one was trying to cure him anymore. And once it was realized that nothing could be done, it was hoped that he would die as quickly as possible for his and everyone else’s relief. This is what Canada is rushing towards now.”

  But how can you comprehend, in 1961, when you are trying to buy a puck, that they are talking about franchises in Los Angeles? And that people, adults you looked up to, would be gulled into thinking that those franchises would be worth something to Canadians. That, to us, was where the real self-delusion lay; we only existed, with Michael skipping school two days a week to put his rink together, in the realm of the possible.

  I would never say the game was greater back then, but no matter how much bigger and stronger the players are now, there was a harder edge to the game in 1961, along with an innocence. The Trail Smoke Eaters seemed to personify this, in a strange way that year.

  Stafford was hoping and praying that Detroit would win the Stanley Cup in 1961 He was too young to remember when they won it in 1955. Most of the people on my side of the street were going for the Habs, although Rocket had just retired, and their dynasty was limping into the future.

  There was Chicago. And the Leafs were on the horizon. They had people from the Toronto Marlboroughs who were coming into their own like Mahovlich. I hated the Million Dollar Baby until he went to Montreal.

  I had strong dislikes. I hated Toronto. They were anti-Hab people. I never warmed to Chicago — I never warmed to Bobby Hull. But I went for any team playing Toronto. Just as today I go for any team that is playing against Boston. It is irrational, I know. My dislike for Boston started when they got their people — Espo, Orr, Sanderson, McKenzie and others — and my cousin in Boston finally started to claim them. As if suddenly hockey had become acceptable. My uncle would telephone and you’d hear, “Heh heh heh heh heh.”